Hagar Cygler and Yair Agmon share an interest in the material presence of photography, and its intricate relationships with memory. Seen together, their work juxtapose different, relevant and thought-provoking understandings of the role photography plays in the shaping of communal and private histories, and the impact of such narrative over institutional frameworks and familial existence.

However, each of them investigates different aspects of technological possibilities, the collection and editing process of photographic images, and the ways they narrate histories. Whereas Hagar Cygler finds photographs in markets and private collections, while she also searches for collectible objects, Yair Agmon excavates institutional photographic archives. Hagar intervenes in the appearance of the photograph: she cuts, enlarges, regroups, and install photographic images as sculptural objects, alongside and similarly to objects she collects and fabricates. Her works thus comment upon the material presence of photographs and the ways we read them. When she tears apart family albums and private collections, she also finds different ways to re-narrate stories and personal histories. Interestingly, she also began employing these processes when working with photographs of her own family. Yair’s projects begin in institutional archives that have captured, narrated and distributed photographic histories of communities and nations. Yair examines possibilities to isolate fragments from such archives, trying to find new ways to tell the stories of these systems and the histories they preserve. He identifies common features in disparate moments, outlines the emergence of marginalized communities and re-organizes dominant narratives.

Israeli artists Hagar Cygler and Yair Agmon are alumni of the Institute for Jewish Creativity at the American Jewish University, and recent graduates of the MFA program at CALArts.

“El Hambre Como Maestra/Hunger as Teacher” is part of Carolina Caycedo’s ongoing project “Be Dammed” in which she collaborates with riverside populations in various bio-regions to address the socio-environmental impacts of dams. While engaged in fieldwork and research, Caycedo gathers objects, film footage, and testimonies. She also produces drawings, collages, sculptures, and films that document and expand on these experiences. These elements form the basis of an investigation into the devastating ramifications of development as understood through the stories of those affected and their resistance.

Caycedo challenges the separation of the human and the natural, especially in highlighting correlations between the environmental crisis and the persistence of oppression. The human toll of both is a particular concern—close to 185 environmental activists were killed in 2016, amongst them Berta Caceres from Honduras and Nilce de Souza ‘Nicinha’ from Brazil. These women are memorialized through a collective portrait, with water protectors Zoila Ninco from Colombia and Raimunda Silva from Brazil who continue this fight. Fishing nets collected during fieldwork refer to the survival of indigenous traditions and the impact of modernity, and also serve as an homage to these women. When asked who had taught her to fish, Raimunda answered, “Hunger taught me to fish.”

This inherent bodily connection to water runs through the exhibition. The drawing “Dam Knot Anus” (2016) refers to an interview with Kogui indigenous spiritual leader Mamo Pedro Juan, who passed away last June, in which he described a dam as cutting off the connection between bodies of water and communities, like a knot in the veins, or, still worse, a knot in the anus. Also on view is the intrauterine device previously used as a contraceptive by Caycedo and subsequently removed in the process of “undamming” her own body, now transformed into a sculptural relic.

For this exhibition, Caycedo returns to Los Angeles and its own long-standing struggles with water and the power structures that direct its flow. A folktale written by the artist about the Colorado River is here illustrated and translated into Korean and Spanish. This is one of a series of river folktales by the artist—another effort to redirect and rewrite the history of water.

Carolina Caycedo, born in London to Colombian parents, lives and works in Los Angeles. She transcends institutional spaces to work in the social realm, where she participates in movements of territorial resistance, solidarity economies, and housing as a human right. Caycedo has developed publicly engaged projects in Bogotá, Quezon City, Toronto, Madrid, São Paulo, Lisbon, San Juan, New York, San Francisco, Paris, México DF, Tijuana, and London. Her work has been exhibited worldwide with solo shows at Vienna Secession, Vienna; Intermediae-Matadero, Madrid; Galerie du Jour - agnès b., Paris; Alianza Francesa, Bogotá; Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen; 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica; and DAAD Gallery, Berlin. Caycedo has participated in international biennials and triennials including São Paulo (2016), Berlin (2014), Paris (2013), New Museum (2011), Havana (2009), Whitney (2006), Venice (2003), and Istanbul (2001). In 2012, she was a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin resident and received funding from Creative Capital, California Community Foundation, Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Harpo Foundation, Art Matters, Colombian Culture Ministry, Arts Council UK, and Prince Claus Fund. Caycedo’s “El Hambre Como Maestra/Hunger as Teacher” relates to the artist’s book, “River Serpent Book,” and the 2-channel video installation, “To Stop Being a Threat and To Become a Promise,” commissioned by LACMA for “A Universal History of Infamy” as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA.

Clarissa Tossin The Mayan

Sep 9 - Oct 21, 2017

Clarissa Tossin explores (re)appropriation, (mis)representation, and (mis)translation in a series of sculptures based on The Mayan theater.

Clarissa Tossin’s “The Mayan” explores (re)appropriation, (mis)representation, and (mis)translation in a series of sculptures based on The Mayan theater in Los Angeles—a prototypical example of the late 1920s Mayan Revival style that co-opted the architecture and iconography of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures. Originally a venue showcasing a range of theatrical productions, including musicals and comedies, this Mayan-inspired setting has also been used as a Hollywood film set, a porn theater, and now a nightclub since 1990.

Tossin starts from the lobby’s interior, conceived by Francisco Cornejo, where re-interpretations of Mayan glyphs and figures, such as the ruler Ha' K'in Xook, appear from floor to ceiling throughout. Based on the archeological sites of Quirigua and Piedras Negras in Guatemala and Yaxchilán in Mexico, some fragments and arrangements become indecipherable, while others are recreations recognizable to someone familiar with the lexicon. Silicone imprints of the walls and doors are combined with cast figurative gestures borrowed from other Mayan imagery, particularly that of dancers that adorn ceramic vessels. The type of silicone used is commonly employed for special effects to imitate skin.

The core of Tossin’s project plays with her notion that ancient Mayan iconography and accompanying architectonic forms predicate a sophisticated and performative relationship to language. The series of sculptures intend to bear these qualities and situate them in dialog with (mis)translation. The dexterity to create such intricate and densely coded hieroglyphs and their corresponding visuality implicates the body’s symbiotic relationship with the intellect of Mayan cosmology.

Ideas of reproduction continue through the artist’s use of fabric, synthetic hair, and feathers sourced from the internet as well as the Los Angeles Fashion District, directly adjacent to The Mayan theater. These bring the serpent, jaguar, and quetzal—animals central to Mayan cosmology—into play and emphasize our increasingly mediated relationship with the natural world through mimesis. These elements along with the silicone imprints and cast gestures are trussed by wooden stands and become yet another new creation that calls for critical examination within a continuum of appropriation, representation, and translation.

Like the architecture of The Mayan theater itself, Tossin’s work fractures the idea of the copy. As more fanciful references, they pastiche backwards and out of order, repeat and re-imagine. Not forgetting the power dynamics at play, Tossin looks to appropriation as a process of translation and recreation, albeit with some lost elements of comprehension or context. In an act of what Homi Bhabha calls “convergence,” Tossin undertakes her own processes of choice and exclusion, but with the intent to highlight an essential tenet of the anterior—the sophistication of the Mayan performative body.

Clarissa Tossin (b. 1973, Porto Alegre, Brazil; based in Los Angeles and Cambridge) has exhibited at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Latin America Art, Long Beach, CA; the Queens Museum, New York, NY; Wesleyan University’s Zilkha Gallery, Middletown, CT; CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco, CA; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, MI; SITE Santa Fe, NM; the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, TX; among others. She recently concluded a commission from the city of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs for the Getty Foundation’s initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA as part of the exhibition “Condemned To Be Modern” at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Also part of PST: LA/LA, her work will be shown in “Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas” at the UC Riverside Museum of Photography. Tossin received funding from California Community Foundation (2014), Fundação Joaquim Nabuco (2015 and 2014), Artpace San Antonio (2013), the Center for Cultural Innovation (2013 and 2012), and has recently been awarded a 2017-18 Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard University.

Clarissa Tossin gratefully acknowledges Matthew Looper, Professor of Art History, California State University, Chico; Megan E. O’Neil, Associate Curator, Art of the Ancient Americas, LACMA; and the owners of The Mayan theater, Sammy Chao and Susan Chao, without whom this project would not have been possible.

(Los Angeles) Edward Cella Art & Architecture is proud to present Lawrence Halprin: Alternative Scores - Drawing from Life, the first exhibition of a collection of rarely-seen drawings by Lawrence Halprin (1916-2009), a leading figure in American landscape architecture, urban design, and environmental planning during the second-half of the twentieth century. The exhibition reveals Halprin’s almost daily practice of drawing as a means to not only record his diverse visual experiences, but also as a tool to engage with the trials and tribulations of war, the ecstasies of life, and the rawness and beauty in nature. The exhibition includes archival video, photography, and ephemera which provide a historical context for Halprin’s life and work; and highlight the experimental Workshops and happenings that he developed in concert with his wife and influential dancer and choreographer, Anna Halprin.

Lawrence Halprin: Alternative Scores - Drawing from Life is presented concurrently with the Los Angeles A+D Museum’s The Landscape Architecture of Lawrence Halprin. The traveling exhibition, organized by The Cultural Landscape Foundation, debuted in 2016 at the National Building Museum in Washington D.C in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Halprin’s birth. Both exhibitions will be accompanied by special joint programming including tours, lectures and public events which notably highlight Halprin’s work and legacy in Southern California. See listings below.

The exhibition features the breadth of Halprin’s drawing over seven decades, and highlight his range of styles and approaches to the craft. The earliest works reflect Halprin’s Modernist sensibility that developed at the Harvard Graduate School of Design where he studied with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Walter Gropius, and Marcel Breuer, among others. Once graduated, he enlisted in WWII in 1943, and served in the South Pacific on the U.S.S. Morrison where he recorded the tropical landscapes he encountered for the first time and the immediate horrors of war though pen and ink. Lost for decades, these drawings were only found after his death in 2009.

Upon discharge in 1946, Halprin arrived in San Francisco and was joined by Anna, where they would remain throughout his life. Processing the post-traumatic stress of his service though drawing, his output began to converge with Anna’s performance-based practice; a visceral, inspirational platform which greatly informed his own work. Aside from his involvement with costume design and visual “scoring” of performative actions, the impulsivity and expressive physicality of Anna’s work becomes visually paralleled in the spontaneity and abstraction in Halprin’s drawings. The Halprins’ intimate personal and artistic partnership was the breeding ground for a lifetime of experimental performance workshops and communal living, which played a significant role in his ideas about landscape design and new graphic techniques to visually represent not only the physical landscape, but the experience of it.

The exhibition also includes drawings of Sea Ranch, a community on the Northern California coast that is one of Halprin’s most notable architectural achievements and heralds a sensitivity to protecting California’s unparalleled coastline. The dramatic rocks and crags of the coast and the relentless power and movement of nature are seemingly Halprin’s greatest sources of awe and inspiration. Lawrence Halprin: Alternative Scores - Drawing from Life offers his naturalist and botanical studies and powerful abstractions, always reflecting a deep engagement with life and an emotional inner-self.

With a resurgent interest in the work of Lawrence Halprin, ECAA is thrilled to present this extensive and singular collection of rare works on paper in the possession of the Halprin family. The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color exhibition catalogue entitled, Personal Space: The Drawing Collection of Lawrence Halprin, with essays by Eva Friedberg, independent scholar of architecture history, urban studies and landscape theory, and an introduction by Charles A. Birnbaum, President and CEO of The Cultural Landscape Foundation. Drawings from the Halprin Family Collection have been recently acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and will be featured in a forthcoming exhibition at the museum, illustrating the legacy of Sea Ranch in the context of California Design.

Featuring fifty-six newly commissioned photographs by leading landscape photographers,
the exhibition offers an overview of the life and work of landscape architect Lawrence Halprin (1916-2009). Organized during the 2016 during the centennial anniversary of Halprin’s birth by The Cultural Landscape Foundation, the exhibition includes recently rediscovered residential projects created early in his career in the 1950s to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C., capstone projects such as Stern Grove in San Francisco and the Yosemite Falls approach, and significant postmodernist projects in the Los Angeles area including a sequence of public parks in DTLA including Grand Hope Park, the Bunker Hill Steps, Maguire Gardens and Plaza Las Fuentes in Pasadena. The exhibition both honors the influential designer and calls attention to the need for informed and effective stewardship of his irreplaceable legacy.

The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color gallery guide The Landscape Architecture of Lawrence Halprin that was written by Charles A. Birnbaum FASLA, FAAR, President and CEO, and Nord Wennerstrom, Director of Communications, and published by The Cultural Landscape Foundation. There is also a complimentary online exhibition with additional photography, recollections by clients and colleagues, and segments of a video oral history with Halprin available at tclf.org/sites/default/files/microsites/halprinlegacy/index.htm

Through sculptural and video installations, digital animation, drawing, printmaking, and artist books, Sowon Kwon has employed translation as both artistic medium and the subject of critique in her art since the early 1990s. Kwon’s formative early work “From the Land of Porcelain,” 1993, turns James McNeill Whistler’s “Peacock Room,” 1876-77, into a series of reliefs. This piece offers a literal shallowness of depth to correspond to the symbolic flatness of Whistler’s design, influenced by fantasies of Asia. The installation was included in The New Museum’s 1993 exhibition “Trade Routes,” which, like the more-studied 1993 Whitney Biennial, addressed cultural identity in the face of globalization. However, identity politics is about much more than cultural exchange—It is about the negotiation of the self.

The exhibition “coffee table comma books” includes work from across Kwon’s career and is conceived, in the artist’s words, as “a small registry of various associative couplings: then and now, writing and making, homophones and namesakes (샘 and Sam), the domicile and the workplace, the literal and the figurative, the private/personal and the public/historical.”

Kwon’s 1994 relief sculpture “Coffee Table and Escritoire (after Godwin),” presented here at Full Haus for the first time since its inclusion in The Queens Museum’s 1994 exhibition Live-Work, depicts an anamorphic interior space furnished with a writing desk and side table designed by Edward William Godwin, a nineteenth-century designer whose “Anglo-Japanese” style influenced the Arts and Crafts movement. The relief sculpture destabilizes the style and its underlying projections of the East by translating it into spatial terms that require viewers to move to a set position in order to see the image without distortion. Installed at Full Haus, the sculpture returns furniture to the gallery, acknowledging the space’s domestic interior.

Language plays an important role in Kwon’s practice, and in addition to her historical relief sculpture, coffee table comma books includes two of Kwon’s artist books. Her 2010 “dongghab” takes its title from the Korean concept of a social relationship between people of the same age. In 1963—the year of Kwon’s birth—Ed Ruscha published “Twentysix Gasoline Stations” and Sylvia Plath committed suicide by gas in her home. Taking this convergence as a departure point, “dongghab” explores an alternative form of self portraiture. Kwon’s 2017 book “S as in Samsam,” co-published by Secretary Press and Triple Canopy, also employs arbitrary similarity: a homophone between a Korean honorific for teacher and the ubiquitous English name Sam.

Kwon’s most recent work, “Fiction,” 2017, depicts a comma adorned with fake eyelashes. Of all punctuation marks, the comma is the most likely to be forgotten—with the possible exception of its twin, the apostrophe. The comma helps to locate the terms on either side, which could stand for an ideal practice of negotiating the self. As Kwon writes: “To a break in verse or a shift in pitch, like caesuras. In music, where a caesura is noted, metrical time is not counted…. Yes, to all that.”

***

Sowon Kwon (b. 1963 Seoul, Korea) has had solo exhibitions at The Kitchen in New York City, Matrix Gallery/University of CA Berkeley Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris. Her work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions including at The New Museum, The ICA Boston, MOCA Los Angeles, The Queens Museum, The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Artist Space, The Drawing Center, Artsonje Center in Seoul, Korea, the Gwangju Biennale, the Yokohama Triennale in Japan, and San Art in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. She is a recipient of fellowships from The New York Foundation for the Arts in Sculpture, The Wexner Center for the Arts in Media Arts, and The Asian Cultural Council. She holds a BA from UC Berkeley, an MFA from Pratt, and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1991. She currently teaches in the Graduate Fine Arts Program at Parsons The New School in New York City.​

How long into the future will our language exist? Across the universe, in a place where no matter or radiation can escape, sings the cluster of Perseus. At 57 octaves below middle C, this lonely hero drones at a frequency of 10 million years, imperceptible to the human ear. Each great society has a history of being born, flourishing, crumbling, and dying. Certainly, we must attempt to touch our distant future as we follow our fate. Can artists create a new language which can withstand societal breakdowns and natural or anthropogenic disasters? What should they say?

Abandoning the alpha-numeric and emoji-ridden language of our time, these artists rely on tone, color, material, geometry, and sound (or lack thereof) to communicate to the thick darkness of an unknown future.

Part I
“It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive.” –C.W. Leadbeater

“Sometimes he saw his real face / And sometimes a stranger at his place / Even the greatest stars find their face in the looking glass.” –“The Hall of Mirrors,” Kraftwerk
“The darkest place is underneath the lamp.” -Chinese proverb

PART II
In his catalogue essay for the exhibition “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1980–1985,” (1986) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, curator Maurice Tuchman proposed that early historical abstraction was generated from five elements of the spiritual, which referred to underlying modes of thought –cosmic imagery, vibration, synesthesia, duality, and sacred geometry. “More Light” proposes new modes of thought such as the transference of language, science, perception, theosophy, and the transcendental. The exhibition presents painting, sculpture, film, and installation engaged with the interstitial spaces of the image-world and the intangible world.

PART III
“More Light” is an exhibition about perception, about the transmission of language, about storytelling and pithy statements. It is about allegory. It is about awareness of the outside world, and the individual, and a sensitivity to their plights and turmoil. It is about social identity and political power, and how those economies are communicated. It is about multivocality. The artists in the exhibition resist traditional images of the spiritual or the secular in favor of the prismatic and the plural. “More Light” asks to vanquish the dark in favor of the light for the sake of ourselves and of all others.

“More Light” is the third in a series of exhibitions organized by Gladys-Katherina Hernando, including—“The White Album” (2014), Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles, and “The Elegant Universe” (2015), The Pit, Los Angeles—that explore the experiential relationship of art and the perception of the viewer.

Jeremy Anderson: “Taking the World Apart is Easy, It is Getting it Back Together in an Acceptable Form That is Difficult.”

Curated by Dan Nadel

The Landing is pleased to present a Jeremy Anderson (1921-1982) retrospective exhibition. Arguably one of the two founding figures in Northern California sculpture, Anderson was the first sculptor in the region to seamlessly combine biomorphic abstraction, Surrealist literary allusion and modernist world-play in the form of meticulously crafted objects. He was, like his teacher, Clyfford Still, and students such as William T. Wiley and Robert Hudson, a one-man movement whose solitary work and aversion to groups has kept him from widespread recognition. His sculptures ranged from intimate erotic figures to epic totemic forms, to wittily abstract landscape, all masterfully executed in, variously, magnesite, redwood, and polychrome. This exhibition, the largest survey of his work in over 20 years, presents sculptures and drawings from 1950 to 1982.

Born and raised in Northern California, Anderson served in the US Navy from 1941 until the war’s end and then studied with Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, David Park, Clay Spohn and Robert Howard at the California School of Fine Arts. While receiving a heady indoctrination into Modernism, he also became fascinated with Surrealism as well as ancient weapons, Oceanic and African statuary, and ritual stone formations. by 1951 Anderson had a developed sense of his influences and interests: Surrealism, mythopoetic abstraction, wordplay, weaponry, worship objects, psychiatry, and sex. These interests fueled the creation of objects that have a profound sense of touch (whether his own or thousands of years of human contact), hold meaning within them, and suggest ideas to the viewer both functional and spiritual.

The earliest works in the present exhibition are plaster and magnesite, and in their globular and cage-like forms resemble Giacomotti and Miro’s work. By the early 1950s, Anderson had settled on redwood  the most readily available material around his studio, but also one with a deep, ruddy coloration that became a hallmark of Anderson’s work. And these pieces, which were exhibited in Chicago and New York at Allan Frumkin and Stable Gallery, respectively, can be broken down into two categories: the horizontal planes, a la Noguchi and Giacometti, which nod at topographical maps of landscapes (which would become the artist’s primary mode of drawing in the 1960s), boats, and chess games; and complex vertical totems that twist, protrude bulbous masses, and house other boxes these come very close to the worship objects Anderson loved.

The 1960s were perhaps Anderson’s most fertile decade. Anderson began a fruitful relationship with the Dilexi Gallery and was the subject of museum retrospectives in 1966-67 at the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Pasadena Art Museum. In 1967 Peter Selz included Anderson in his Funk exhibition, where the artist was, like Peter Voulkos, viewed as an elder statesman.
In works like Between, Source, and Altar, he finally combined horizontal and vertical, and made objects of profound strangeness. Between resembles a the interior of a boat, with two levels. It holds forms inside it and is those forms. It manages to be object and container all at once. Source resembles an imagined worktable for the artist at work and at contemplation  if the table was also the work itself. And Altar is one of Anderson’s earliest nods at figuration. Upon two legs is a table and corresponding leaf. As the decade wore on, he focused on color and figuration with a vengeance, making sculptures that synthesized the mystical vibes and formal mastery of his earlier sculptures with the bright Pop of that decade. Toys of a Prince, based on Giorgio De Chirico’s Playthings of a Prince, 1915, physically catalogs De Chirico’s “playthings” as though the painter had absurdly suggested they might need to exist one day as oversized polychrome objects set carefully on an enormous tabletop. Lotus Eaters, is a hallucinatory symphony of sex-like forms  doing everything Anderson wanted to suggest about the pleasures of the flesh but not show. When Anderson was explicitly erotic, he made Belladonna Amarllyis, a life sized female figure made of pine and posing atop a fake tiger skin surface. She might be related to Andersons’s miniature series, Mrs. Allfours  small bronzes of a woman in various poses and vignettes. These small works, along with Anderson’s much later Heart and Souls serieses are among the artist’s most playful. This was a man, after all, whose favorite book was Finnegan’s Wake, and he revelled in ribald puns.

Anderson’s love of wordplay is very much on display in his drawings, which range from his Map works, which identify places and ideas equally  from “A BEWILDERING VISIT TO THE SEASIDE” to “A NEW KIND OF LOVE” to “NEW KIND OF LOVE” to “DOWN EAST.” The artist’s drawing activity included this and, of course, copious expressive drawings for sculptures  here Anderson seems to be finding form through lines, and often drawing the air around the form, as well. The maps, and drawing itself, amply displayed here, is the surest way to track Anderson’s thoughts  as he might have put it, his entire artistic life was as a cartographer of the unconscious.

Mid-City Angels is a pseudo-residency where the exhibited works build over time. Savitsky will move his studio practice into the gallery, and every weekend invite a series of guests to collaborate. Each session will be like performance, open to the public, and documented. Unscheduled visitors will be able to observe this process or may themselves become subjects, or directors.

This project is a continuation of Savitsky's interest in defining the absent figure; creating form out of absence. Blending sculpture and performance-based processes, Savitsky's work probes ideas about gender, the body, and intimacy, while constructing theatrical environments.

Please join Matt Savitsky and STL LA in the making of mid-city angels.

The first day of open performances is Saturday, September 30, 12-5pm.

At the end of the phrases, it breaks, and that break makes it so sweet that it seems borne up by the music of angels, of which I feel the horror, for angels fill me with horror, being, as I imagine, neither mind nor matter, white, filmy and frightening, like the translucent bodies of ghosts.

A flash of torso, a t-shirt, underwear, low-slung pants. They form the color fields of red, white, and blue that compose the landscape-inspired photographs in Them Boys, David Alekhougie’s show at Skibum MacArthur. In his exploration of bodies and states of (un)dress, David exposes and subverts the meanings and mythologies—of desire and fear, inextricably intertwined, and often involving racial and gendered politics—we ascribe to fashions and the bodies they simultaneously cloak and reveal.

“Brothers should pull up their pants,” even (the then) President Obama chimed in. Though the saggy pants style has been around for three decades, it has triggered public consternation among politicians in recent years and spurred a spate of local ordinances around the country, resulting in fines and at times prison time. Predominantly associated with urban hip hop culture, the prohibition of low hanging pants suggests camouflaged regulation of black male bodies and their self-presentation. David complicates the heavily coded narrative by posing his saggy pant compositions on both mannequins and models, males and females. The wide swaths of color in the close-up images also feature branding of labels with potent associations with the urban and Americana like Tommy Hilfiger, True Religion and Dickies. Cropped and abstracted yet seductive, the photographs dialogue with advertising imagery and hint at the commodification of the sagging style. (After all, Justin Bieber’s sag swag got him a Calvin Klein underwear contract.)

The photographs are accompanied by cyanotypes toned in Epson ink of classical statuary, juxtaposing contemporary representations of male bodies and fashions against transferred images of ancient idealized figures and garments set in stone. In addition, sculptures cast from lower half body mannequins out of concrete, the modern industrial stone material, recall the classical marble figures depicted in the cyanotypes. In Them Boys, fragments of bodies recur, the succinct synecdoches hinting at the anxieties, of lust and disgust, about the public persona versus the private self, felt over bodies throughout history and in our current moment.

David Alekhuogie was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago earning a post-baccalaureate Bachelor of Art with a focus in Photography in 2013 and Master's of Fine Art from Yale University in 2015.

Alekhuogie’s multi-disciplinary art practice is centered around photography and investigates and questions the dialectical relationships between politics, race, gender, media, and power. Alekhuogie’s work has been exhibited and collected nationally and internationally and his art has been published in publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time Magazine, Timeout magazine, Chicago magazine, Vice magazine, and The Los Angeles Times. Alekhuogie lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

South Bay Contemporary Gallery in conjunction with Michael Stearns Studio 347 presents a co-located multi-media exhibition Diasporagasm. Diasporagasm is curated by Beyoncenista – artist April Bey’s alter ego – and acts as a performance bringing together melanated artists working in Los Angeles, Haiti, Ghana, the Caribbean and West Africa.

Drawing from the groundbreaking film Moonlight—a timeless story of human connection and self-discovery, the curator appropriates, amends and recontextualizes the juxtaposition of art race and gender.The works in this exhibition will be from 15 artists who identify as black, but the work itself will not be “black art”. Rather conversations about what it means through individualism to be black, geographic differentiations in culture and how all the baggage carried comes through in work and artist’s work. Diaspora here translates to experiences and the authority that comes with those experiences. While the artists represented identify themselves as black—their walks vary drastically forcing relatability amongst this fictitious construction we call race.

How to Read El Pato Pascual: Disney’s Latin America and Latin America’s Disney is an attempt to engage with the idea that there are no clean boundaries in art, culture, and geography, and to deconstruct how such notions are formed and disputed. For over seventy-five years, the Walt Disney Company has continuously looked to Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America for content, narratives, and characters, beginning with Donald Duck’s first role in the Mexican-themed Don Donald (1937). The 1971 text by Chilean scholars Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart—Para leer al Pato Donald—considered Disney comic books as a form of cultural imperialism, and the curators have used its arguments as a starting point to show that Disney cannot be seen as something simply exported to the rest of the Americas, and passively received. Like any other cultural force or mythology in Latin America, Disney imagery has always been quickly reinterpreted, assimilated, adapted, cannibalized, syncretized, and subverted in popular culture and the fine arts.

Spanning painting, photography, graphic work, drawing, sculpture, and video, as well as folk art and vernacular objects, joint exhibitions at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House and the Luckman Fine Arts Complex at CalState LA explore this history and the ways Latin American artists have responded to, played with, re-appropriated, and misappropriated Disney iconography.

This exhibition will feature work by Latin American artists in the Marciano collection, many of whose works will be on view in Los Angeles for the first time.

The Marciano Art Foundation presents works by Latin American artists featured in its collection including Allora & Calzadilla, Pia Camil, Jose Davila, Gabriel Kuri, Adrián Villar Rojas, Gabriel Orozco, Damian Ortega, Analia Saban, Alex Da Corte and others. Many of the works on view are being exhibited publicly in Los Angeles for the first time.

The Norton Simon Museum presents a small but moving group of seldom-seen works of art from the collection that expound on the theme of mourning. Spanning millennia, cultures and media, from a 3,000 year-old Egyptian coffin to a 1960s silkscreen by Andy Warhol, the artworks on view demonstrate how artists create objects to honor a life, find meaning in tragedy and comfort the living.

Funereal customs and methods of mourning vary from one region to another, reflect different beliefs in the afterlife and range from grief-stricken to raucous. What does not vary, however, is the raw emotion that accompanies loss, and the need to find solace through friends, natural beauty and art. RIP: On Art and Mourning includes a range of objects that explore how artists respond to death. Most striking, perhaps, is a highly decorated Egyptian coffin from c. 1100–500 BCE. A rare example of Egyptian art in the Simon collection, the coffin is decorated with hieroglyphic writing that identifies the deceased as a chantress named Tarutu, who sang in the Temple of Amun, in Tekhneh, modern-day Akoris in Upper Egypt, on the east bank of the Nile. Two other examples from the Classical world are an ancient Attic grave stele commemorating a young mother named Philokydis (c. 360–350 BCE), and an encaustic portrait of a young unnamed man, painted in Egypt in the Greco-Roman style (second century CE).

Later works include Horace Vernet’s poignant oil on canvas Soldier in the Field of Battle (1818) and Goya’s haunting Beds of Death (1863) from the print series Disasters of War. These powerful works of art take viewers beyond personal suffering to world-weary scenes of war, plague and political confrontation. Eugène Atget’s photograph Funeral (Pompe Funèbre–1e classe) (1910, printed 1956 by Bernice Abbott from Atget’s negative) captures a decorated funeral coach with horses sitting patiently in full sun in front of the Church of Saint-Sulpice. Andy Warhol’s Jacqueline Kennedy II (Jackie II) (1966) evokes the grief of the nation in 1963, depicting the First Lady at the funeral of her assassinated husband. A serene death mask of the Jewish-Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani, who died of tubercular meningitis at age 35, was lovingly cast by his heartbroken friend Jacques Lipchitz (1920).

RIP: On Art and Mourning brings this disparate group of artworks together to remind visitors about the essential role of art in times of grief. It is organized by Carol Togneri, chief curator at the Norton Simon Museum and installed in the small exhibition gallery on the Museum’s main level from September 8 through November 27, 2017.

Hollywood in Havana: Five Decades of Cuban Posters Promoting U.S. Films, on view at the Pasadena Museum of California Art (PMCA) August 20, 2017–January 7, 2018, assembles approximately 40 Cuban posters publicizing Hollywood films from the 1960s to 2009. Astonishing in their design, stylistic diversity, and artistic skill, these bold and vibrant posters helped create visual literacy among the Cuban population in the decades following the Cuban Revolution. The screenprints go beyond the glossy and celebrity- filled lm posters that are ubiquitous in Los Angeles today and reawaken viewers to the nuanced visual signs that inform and shape their worldviews.

Produced by the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) or the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry, the posters were part of an initiative of the revolutionary government to develop cultural awareness and consciousness after Fidel Castro and the guerrilla forces overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgenico Batista in 1959. Today, the posters stand independent of the films they represent. Their magnetism and innovative use of design elements continue to spark conversation and understanding about the role of lm, culture, art, and politics in Cuba as well as California.

Poster designers working during the early years of the Revolution had few material resources and operated in an almost artisanal manner, using the silkscreen technique. While the limited resources imposed by the U.S. embargo inspired many of the design decisions, revolutionary ideals can also be cited as source material. Screenprints created for Cuban audiences to promote iconic American films, such as Modern Times, Singin’ in the Rain, Cabaret, Schindler’s List, and Silence of the Lambs, are in striking contrast to the vast majority of Hollywood posters for the same films, which formulaically feature faces of the movies’ stars. Instead, the imagery depicted often relates to an iconic element or moment in the lm, such the umbrella in Singin’ in the Rain. ICAIC posters employ creativity and free expression as well as a variety of art styles, including Art Nouveau, abstraction, Pop, and Op, many of which mirror the American counter-culture of the times.

Selected from the collection of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG), the exhibited posters showcase the range and ingenuity of Cuban screenprinters and provide audiences an opportunity to understand a complex culture from a new perspective. “Based on a shared love of films, Hollywood in Havana identifies commonalities between Cubans and Californians,” says Carol A. Wells, curator of the exhibition and Founder and Executive Director of the CSPG. “The exhibition creates a dialogue not only about these visually stunning and easily approachable posters but also regarding longstanding stereotypes about Cuba and its government.”
During a time when momentous changes are underway for Cuban-American relations, Hollywood in Havana adds to the discourse between the two countries. Presenting Cuban lm art in the lm capital of the world encourages viewers to consider the power of these posters as well as the printed media and graphic designs that permeate their daily lives. The exhibition demonstrates how art, entertainment, and politics intersect and integrate to influence and reflect cross-cultural communication.

Dave Lefner LA Redux: Reduction Linocuts by Dave Lefner

Aug 20, 2017 - Jan 7, 2018

Dave Lefner (b.1969) has explored and preserved the vintage characteristics of Los Angeles in the reduction linocut printmaking process.

For the last 25 years native Angeleno and one of the country’s foremost reduction linocut artists Dave Lefner (b. 1969) has explored and recorded the historic and vintage characteristics of Los Angeles, from the sleek lines of mid-century American automobiles, to roadside signage for motels and mom and pop diners, to dilapidated neon theater marquees. A self-professed “old soul,” Lefner preserves the icons of America’s Golden Age in the exacting, time-consuming, and relatively lost art of reduction linocuts. The artist’s prints depict a nostalgia for the glamour of old Los Angeles with both a playfulness and masterful precision that belies their complex creation. LA Redux: Reduction Linocuts by Dave Lefner, an exhibition on view at the Pasadena Museum of California Art (PMCA) from August 20, 2017–January 7, 2018, explores Lefner’s prints and practice, presenting a vivid picture of Los Angeles’s past and present as well as the ingenuity and creative processes the city continues to inspire.
While studying art at California State University, Northridge and experimenting with different media, Lefner discovered the reduction linocut printmaking technique. This painstaking process, greatly innovated by Pablo Picasso in the 1950s, requires the skills of an artisan and the vision and forethought of an artist. The combination of art and craft was particularly appealing to Lefner, who sought an art form that would challenge him as an artist and felt authentic amidst the disarray and cynicism that continued to engulf the postmodern art world in the 1990s.

Armed with his newfound form of expression, Lefner focused on subject. Inspired by Picasso, Stuart Davis’s abstracted paintings of New York City, LA architecture and car culture, typefaces and fonts, and the Ferus Gallery Pop artists, the urban landscape of Los Angeles became his principal muse. The artist’s linocuts quickly began to reflect the sunny West Coast optimism of the post-war period. “My work is nostalgic, but I’m also very much a realist,” says Lefner. “I love to imagine the history of this city, all shiny and new, with nighttime neon glowing bright. But most of the time, I’m drawn into the daylight details, when peeling paint, busted tubing, and lengthening shadows are cast like haunting specters of the past. ”

Very few artists today work in reduction linocuts, which are sometimes called “suicide prints” because of the potential for irreversible mistakes made during the carving and printmaking process. Working from his own photographs for reference, Lefner creates a charcoal drawing that is conversely transferred to a single block
of linoleum. He then carves the block in stages, each stage creating a layer of color and part of the print’s composition. A single, irreproducible edition takes weeks or even months to complete, usually totaling no more than seven prints. Despite the fastidious nature of reduction linocuts, Lefner remains unfazed and faithful to the city and craft he loves.

On view in the PMCA’s Project Room, the exhibition celebrates the artist’s significance as part of the Los Angeles and PMCA community. Not only does Lefner live and work at The Brewery, the world’s largest artist colony, he also regularly leads printmaking workshops at the PMCA and is one of the honorees at the Museum’s ¡Fiesta Cubana! gala in fall 2017. Featuring approximately 10 prints, LA Redux, like the artist’s retro prints, revives the bygone architecture, signage, and automobiles of Los Angeles while shining a neon spotlight on the artist’s dedication to craft and the perpetuation of culture.

E. Charlton Fortune E. Charlton Fortune: The Colorful Spirit

Aug 20, 2017 - Jan 7, 2018

The exhibition pairs the artist's impressionist and modernist landscapes with her ecclesiastical artworks produced for the Catholic Church.

California artist E. Charlton Fortune (1885–1969) came of age during a time when women began to challenge the status quo and redefine their expected roles in society. E. Charlton Fortune: The Colorful Spirit, an exhibition on view at the Pasadena Museum of California Art (PMCA) August 20, 2017–January 7, 2018, showcases the work of this trailblazing female and one of California’s most significant artists. Fortune had a thriving career as a painter until the age of forty-three when she began a pioneering new vocation as a liturgical artist and as the leader of the Monterey Guild. The exhibition pairs the artist’s impressionist and modernist landscapes with her ecclesiastical paintings, furnishings, and other work produced for the Catholic Church.

Educated in Europe and the San Francisco Bay Area as well as the at the Arts Students League in New York, Fortune’s paintings depicted the places she lived and traveled—from the tranquil shores of the Monterey Peninsula to areas surrounding her father’s ancestral home in Scotland, to St. Ives, England, and St. Tropez, France, where she lived for extended periods in the 1920s. Though her paintings are frequently labeled impressionist, Fortune’s work moved beyond the style, a fact well recognized in her own time. Rather than focusing on nature for its own sake, she emphasized humanity’s impact on the land and was best known for colorful landscapes featuring architecture and elements of modern life. Often including active female figures, Fortune’s paintings were socially engaged. They were also strong in color—frequently rendered in primary or complementary hues—and rugged and gestural in execution, leading some reviewers and critics to assume she was a man. Many described her paintings as “masculine,” attributing their success to a perceived virility—then one of the most highly regarded qualities in art.

Starting in 1928, Fortune’s disenchantment with mass-produced ecclesiastical art led her to create designs of her own. She then founded the Monterey Guild, comprised of a group of skilled craftspeople, who, under her direction, created original, modern artworks and furnishings for churches. Her religious objects returned the focus to the liturgy and brought a sense of taste back to into the Church.

Throughout her life, Fortune remained unmarried and independent, and her art demonstrates not only her
bold artistic freedom and mastery of many media, but also the tenacity of a strong and dynamic woman. “In
the early to mid-twentieth century, E. Charlton Fortune was one of the most important California artists, male
or female,” says curator of the exhibition Scott A. Shields, Ph.D. “The fact that she was a woman working at a transitional moment and in an atmosphere that still discouraged female professionals makes her achievements all the more extraordinary. No one disputes her standing as one of California’s most prestigious artists.” Through approximately 80 works, E. Charlton Fortune: The Colorful Spirit illuminates this formidable artist’s contributions to early California painting and American liturgical design as well as the indomitable spirit of a progressive woman.

This exhibition explores the unexamined influence of Mexican art and artists on the development of art in China, offering a greater understanding of ties between trans-Pacific creative communities.

Winds from Fusang: Cultural Dialogues between Mexican and Chinese Artists will be the first major exhibition to explore the influence of 20th-century Latin American art and artists on contemporary Chinese art. While it is generally believed that only after the “opening” of China in the 1980s did the West begin to play a significant role in shaping contemporary Chinese art, there were, in fact, other Western influences prior to the Cultural Revolution, especially at mid- century, when China was supposedly closed to the outside world. Using works from public and private collections in the U.S., China, and Latin America, Crossing Pacific will demonstrate how themes, techniques, and specific artists from Mexico and other Latin American countries who visited China—including José Venturelli, Miguel Covarrubias, and David Alfaro Siqueiroshad an outsized influence on the burgeoning Chinese contemporary art community.

Through a series of thematically linked exhibitions, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA will present a wide variety of important works of art, much of them new to Southern California audiences. While the majority of exhibitions will have an emphasis on modern and contemporary art, there also will be crucial exhibitions about the ancient world and the pre-modern era. With topics such as luxury objects in the pre-Columbian Americas, 20th-century Afro-Brazilian art, alternative spaces in Mexico City, and boundary-crossing practices of Latino artists, exhibitions will range from monographic studies of individual artists to broad surveys that cut across numerous countries.

While the exhibitions will focus on the visual arts, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA programs will ultimately expand to touch on music, performance, literature, and even cuisine. Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA will be a multifaceted event that will transform Los Angeles and Southern California for five months, and our understanding of modern and contemporary art forever.

Embracing organizations of all sizes and types — from the largest museums to smaller museums, from university galleries to performing arts centers — Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA exhibitions and programs will take place across Southern California, from Santa Barbara to San Diego, from Santa Monica to Palm Springs.

With its historical roots in Latin America and its current demographics, Los Angeles might be described as tomorrow's capital city. In a way that is possible only in Los Angeles, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA will implicitly raise complex and provocative issues about present-day relations throughout the Americas and the rapidly changing social and cultural fabric of Southern California.

Each iteration of Pacific Standard focuses on a critical aspect of Southern California's pivotal role in the history of art and architecture.